On Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:47:06 -0500, Tom Ring
wrote:

Do you have any idea what the real
differences were in the libraries?

Hi Tom,

I can only speculate from my experience coding various expansion
series before the 8087 was generally available. My guess is they went
with the first one in a cookbook - Newton's method comes to mind, but
that is of vague recollection. It is generally useful as a first pass
method. M$ became extinct in the Pascal marketplace soon after. I
also moved on into C++ in the late 80s (a local company here wrote one
of the first cross-compilers).

The M$ crowd thought they would take that one on too. In 1990 they
asked me to come in and give classes. What a fiasco. The first
question was how to do inline code. They were arrogant to the point
of wanting to call "their" version C++++ with the +s stacked in pairs
to produce #. Can anyone guess how long C-sharp took to get to market?

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

On 27 Sep 2006 02:49:55 GMT, I wrote wrote:
What sort of gain is expected from an EDZ? I tweaked the topology
of my design a bit in the hope of getting a broader bandwidth, but
instead got even more gain. For example, the version represented
below has a minimum gain of more than 4.7 dBi (at the side) and more
than 5.25 dBi in the forward direction. Previously I reported gain
values that ran from 4.2-4.7 dBi. So this one represents a bit of an
improvement. I may try building it this weekend. Thanks, --John

I found time this weekend to construct this antenna and it seems to
work quite well. See http://www.jedsoft.org/fun/antennas/omni.html
for the details including a picture of the antenna.

While testing it, I made a contact through a distant repeater (40
miles away) and was told that the signal was solid. This was with the
antenna in its test position with the center about 10 feet off the
ground and the transmitter power at 5 watts. Unfortunately I cannot
be more quantitation than that.

Unless I have overlooked some other design, this seems to be an
extremely simple and effective home-brew antenna.

Comments welcome.
Thanks,
--John